Transient spiral structure and the disc velocity substructure in Gaia DR2

Abstract

The second data release from ESA's Gaia mission has revealed many ridge-like structures in the velocity distribution of the Milky Way. We show that these can arise naturally from winding transient spiral structure that is commonly seen in N-body simulations of disc galaxies. We construct test particle models of the winding spiral structure, and compare the resulting distribution of orbits with the observed two-dimensional velocity distribution in the extended solar neighbourhood and with the distribution of rotational velocities over 8 kpc along the Sun-Galactic-centre-Galactic anticentre line. We show that the ridges in these observations are well reproduced by the winding spiral model. Additionally, we demonstrate that the transient winding spiral potential can create a Hercules-like feature in the kinematics of the solar neighbourhood, either alone, or in combination with a long-slow bar potential.